Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Historically, I've always had custom-picked PCs built for me, or I've assembled them myself using Shuttle XPCs as the basis for the build. When it came to laptops, I was a three-consecutive-model Fujitsu guy, so I didn't have a lot of experience when it came to long-term ownership of more mainstream brands such as Dell and HP. In the past year, I've switched gears a bit and now own two HP Pavilion Slimline desktop computers, a Dell XPS M1330 laptop, and am in the process of reviewing an HP tx2000 laptop. I've noticed something quite interesting regarding the software tools that HP and Dell use for keeping the computer running smooth: HP's tools are very sophisticated, and Dell's tools are quite crude.

Let's talk about updates for a minute: while Windows Update does a great job at keeping the Windows operating system up to date with patches, it's much less useful when it comes to hardware drivers and software application updates. More often than not, I've found that if I listen to Windows Update and download an updated hardware driver, I end up screwing up my system in some fashion. So while Microsoft will eventually improve the tool to the point where I'll trust it again, for now if there are driver updates for the system, it's up to the system manufacturer to make that as easy and transparent as possible for the user. Read more...